Biking effect on "explosiveness"/speed?

[Syringer]

So I've been really getting into biking lately, but also love to play basketball/football--two sports that rely a lot on speed/jumping ability. What I'm wondering is if biking helps in these two aspects since it's working out your legs on a constant basis--or if it hurts it since there isn't much "explosiveness" action going on, for the most part.

I know when I did cross country back in high school my overall sprint speeds and high jumping were hurt a bit by it--so is there any particular type of biking "styles" that I can incorporate in order to not be slowed down at all?

 

[GenHoth]

Xplosive spiders. I mean mountain biking

 

[CLite]

If you are fit and you are doing a reasonable amount of biking nothing will change regarding your basketball and football performance. Perhaps you will gain a small amount of stamina, but nothing is going to effect your "explosiveness" unless you are doing extremely long flat bike outings at a slow clip.

I'd be more worried about ball handling for both those sports than whether or not your recreational biking will effect your recreational bball/football performance.

 

[brikis98]

In general, road biking will primarily increase your stamina, aerobic endurance and the anaerobic endurance of your legs. All of these are certainly going to be useful for basketball (or any sport), but they are not going to significantly help your power (aka explosiveness), strength, agility, speed, etc. In fact, if you are doing very long bike rides, or any very extended endurance events, you are likely to experience some loss of muscle mass (and consequently strength/power) and possibly flexibility. I doubt this will be a major factor (unless you bike so much that you aren't recovering fast enough from it), but I certainly wouldn't expect it to help your strength/power any. However, mountain biking and "bike hopping" (not sure if that's the proper name, but it's the stuff you see in this video) put different demands on the body and hence, produce different results. The need for precise body control, the ability to absorb impact and especially the crazy jumping involved will definitely produce far more strength, power, agility & coordination than normal road biking.

In general though, if you love biking, then do biking. If you need power/explosiveness on the basketball court, you may get a better bang for your buck training that separately than trying to include that in your biking. For example, doing olympic style lifting and/or plyometrics a few days a week would likely help your "explosiveness" far more than any amount of biking.